Fox subpoenas YouTube over “24,” “Simpsons” episodes

Twentieth Century Fox wants to know who has been uploading complete TV show …

Twentieth Century Fox has issued a subpoena to YouTube in an attempt to find out who uploaded episodes of "The Simpsons" and "24." Although the story is getting plenty of play in the tech press, it's not especially novel: YouTube coughed up a name when the same thing happened last year. It is an excellent reminder, though, that individual uploaders do not have the same "safe harbor" guarantee that has kept YouTube afloat.

Plenty of the site's users appear to think that the worst trouble they can get into would be having their videos pulled and their account suspended. After all, YouTube's activity falls under the safe-harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), so the most that copyright owners can do is request that the offending video be taken down, right?

Except it's not true. While the safe-harbor provision keeps YouTube in the clear, it does nothing to shield the individual uploaders, whose boats are kept outside the harbor, subject to wind, waves, and pirates. The entire point of the provision was to make sure that web sites were not punished for behavior they could not control. This doesn't apply to individuals, who are very much in control of what they decide to upload to such sites and are responsible for what they do with such material.

Copyright holders still retain the ability to get a subpoena and pursue the individuals who uploaded illicit content, and in this case it looks like Fox is bent on nailing ECOTotal, the user in question. It's bound to be a lot of work: the only verifiable part of the YouTube registration is the e-mail address, which can itself be difficult to trace and will no doubt require more subpoenas. If Fox gets lucky, then ECOTotal will have listed his or her real name and ZIP code with the site, though this would clearly not be a good idea for users planning to upload entire episodes of television shows before they air.

TV episodes are widely available through P2P services already, though, which raises the question of why Fox decided to invest its resources this way. Our guess is that it's simply designed to send a reminder to YouTube users that the rise of video-sharing sites has not eliminated copyright protection. Judging from the astonishing number of music videos uploaded to the site (even before it began to make peace with the labels), this is a lesson that many young YouTubers have yet to learn.